Murray Royston Ward - Language Is A Virus

Language is a Virus

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In mid 2015 my wife worked in Sierra Leone managing an Ebola Holding
Centre. With no confirmed cases of Ebola in the region a very broad list of
potential symptoms still required several patients to be isolated, with limited
care, until a negative diagnosis could be confirmed. These patients either
died or suffered as the protocols prevented them from receiving the
necessary care. The symptoms which trigger these protocols would equally
describe everything from flu to liver failure and once quarantine was enacted
any further diagnosis would be off limits.

The initial Ebola response was widely criticised and Medecins Sans
Frontieres report that countless warnings went unheeded. The international
community were caught very much on the back-foot and it is appropriate to
question whether aspects of the response became heavy handed and driven
by external, non-medical pressures.

Further, numerous stakeholders were vying for power or scoring political
points: funding restrictions; control enacted by large international donors;
local political manoeuvring; military power plays.

My wife's experiences in the field also pointed to a more insidious lack of
mutual respect, particularly by European workers, at least in part driven by
colonial histories. For example, many European staff where she was based
refused to eat with the local nurses and frequently accused them of either
being lazy, incompetent or both. In reality the local teams had far more direct
experience with Ebola patients than any of these NGO volunteers but this
knowledge was frequently dismissed.

The media landscape surrounding Ebola is no less ill-informed and
misunderstood: 'Africa' is imagined as a homogenous racial sphere rather
than a complicated continent of nations and cultures; fetishised visions of
'African-ness' such as fabricated sexual practices that even cross the
species barrier; eating game mystified as 'bush-meats'; simplified
exaggerations of spiritual practices. The taint of racism and fundamentalist
Christianity still manifest within interactions of structural power and
language.

In West Africa there were equal levels exaggeration and misinformation
including accusations that Ebola either wasn't real or that it was a dangerous
clinical trial inflicted upon the local populations by the US military.
Throughout the region there were incidents of violence, mistrust and
misunderstanding which, whilst mostly isolated, still dramatically shaped the
larger narratives at play. Ebola had 'invaded' the region and was being
manipulated by external forces.

William Burroughs suggests that 'language is a virus'. The written word was
literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word-virus mutated the
throats of pre-human apes and they haven't been able to shut up since. The
word-virus limits the host, through symbiotic-control mechanisms, to best
enable its replication.

A virus is characterized and limited by obligate cellular parasitism. All
viruses must parasite living cells for their replication. For all viruses
the infection cycle comprises entry into the host, intracellular
replication, and escape from the body of the host to initiate a new

cycle in a fresh host.

The language surrounding Ebola has replicated, mutated and spread along
well-established vectors of racial, tribal and colonial history. As national
narrative, language has infected aid budgets, NGO remits, international
cooperation and the politics of Ebola response. In the form of tick-lists,
protocols and pathways it has limited and controlled systems of patient care
in ways that prioritise preventing 'western' infection at the expense of holistic
approaches to individual pain and suffering.

Burroughs further suggests methods by which to combat these parasitic
information flows:

The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of
association. When the lines are cut the associational connections are

broken.

The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a
growing power and more sophisticated technique used by
establishment mass media to falsify misrepresent, misquote, rule out
of consideration as a PRIORI ridiculous or simply ignore and blot out
of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to

establishment interest.

I suggest that the underground press could perform this function
much more effectively by the use of cut/up techniques.

All images courtesy of Holly Royston-Ward

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